WARREN ELLIS is a graphic novelist and author of the NYT best-selling novel GUN MACHINE. His graphic novel GLOBAL FREQUENCY is being developed for television by Jerry Bruckheimer and FOX. He is the writer of the graphic novel RED, adapted into the film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. His next book is NORMAL from FSG.

DESOLATION JONES #1: Author’s Commentary

This is intended as something like a commentary track on a DVD, not a story guide. You’ll need to own a copy of DESOLATION JONES #1 to make sense of it. If you don’t have a copy, and your local store’s out, I’d suggest using a mailorder service like Khepri in North America, or emailing page45@page45.com in the UK and asking for one.

Comments rendered like this are actual excerpts from the script.

PAGE ONE:

PAGE ONE: Everything on this first page is black and white. Everything is also a little spatially distorted. Six-panel grid, three rows of two...

My old grandad, the infamous crazy ice-cream man Fred Austine, had something very similar to this inscribed on a plaque in his bathroom, standing on the toilet.

PAGE FOUR:

This is, of course, the Chemosphere, as designed and built by the visionary architect John Lautner in 1960. I believe the publisher Benedict Taschen lives in it these days. I chose the Chemosphere as Jones’ home because it looks like a spaceship lodged in the Hollywood hills, with Jones as its illegal alien passenger.

Supermodernism: a term I first encountered in architecture, coined by Hans Ibelings, used to describe buildings constructed without context or integral information. Airports are supermodern spaces. Just pipes and sockets, there to pass through or plug into. Places to facilitate swarms and flow. An outsider’s view of LA. Which, I’d remind people, is exactly what Jones’ view is. He’s not looking at LA like a native, a committed long-term resident, or even someone who likes the place much.

Pic 1:Surreal moment: Jones looks out the passenger-side window and thereâ€™s a thick RED LINE taking the place of the road, running alongside them â€“ a massively magnified version of the kind of line that describes roads on maps.

Pic 3;AERIAL SHOT: The car is small in this shot, and itâ€™s driving down a red line that describes a road, and now the rest of the map, of greater LA, is visible all around itâ€¦

See how JH uses that first graphic element, the red line, to connect up the whole page? That was him. That’s why you always try to work with the best people. They add something new into the mix while keeping your intention.

The biggest change JH made — and you’ll need to get hold of the book to really see what I mean — as that, while I wrote it using each page as a unit, JH fused some of the dialogue scenes into double-page spreads. It keeps the pacing I wrote, but suddenly things are moving right across the breadth of the open comic. I wrote the first three isses of JONES “blind”, not knowing who was going to draw it. Usually, I’d be able to adjust to an invention like this much more quickly. It’s going to be #4 before I really take advantage of this new way of looking at the discursive, plot-driving sequences, and using negative space to cap off a scene. It’s a beat and a fade. Anyway. Buy the bloody comic if you don’t have one in front of you. Onward.

PAGE EIGHT:

Most correspondents have rightly identified this scene as inspired by Raymond Chandler’s BIG SLEEP. Once I realised I was writing something in the detective form set in LA, I knew Chandler was going to be in the way. So I said the hell with it, and decided to use Chandler as the starting block instead, pushing off him into (hopefully) new territory. The other visual cue for this scene was Guillermo del Toro’s first, superb film, CRONOS. Watch it, you’ll see what I mean.

PAGE NINE:

Adolf Hitler is said to have at one time possessed the largest collection of nude paintings in Europe. Intelligence documents have also revealed him to be quite addicted to the dirty stories that were run in Nazi rags as a sop to the horny underclasses. And Eva Braun famously took home movies of Hitler at play on holiday. And, you know, they were down in that bunker quite a while. So this doesn’t exactly come right out of left field.

PAGE FOURTEEN:

Some people have asked me if the name Jeronimus Corneliszoon is a Jerry Cornelius reference. It’s not. Jeronimus Corneliszoon is a historical figure, a mad Dutch heretic who, in the 1600s, created a “Lord Of The Flies” style society of terror and mass murder on a wrecked merchant vessel off the coast of Australia. I remember Matt Fraction told me the name, which he’d gotten from his friend Christopher Sebela, whom I guess had been reading the book BATAVIA’S GRAVEYARD. I keep a file for interesting names. In it went, after Fraction and I had quit riffing off the name and he’d stopped calling himself Beat Jeronimus Corneliszoon.

PAGE FIFTEEN:

A Filthy Sanchez is, as one slang dictionary has it, “a sexual act where one fingers one’s partner’s anus and then gives oneself or one’s partner a mustache with the filthy finger.” I took the look of the character from a photoshoot my friend the journalist and novelist Susannah Breslin did a while back. The sign with the girl on horseback comes from the name and logo of the very popular blog Susannah wrote for a few years called REVERSE COWGIRL.

And here she is in all her splendour; except Susannah’s taller and didn’t have her cleavage out. Artistic license, I suspect. The line “everything goes better with bukkake” is something she once said to me. She was quite obsessed with bukkake — for those who don’t know, bukkake is a pornographic form originating in Japan involving group masturbation on to one girl’s face — for some while, and attended a few. “How was it?” I asked after one. “As ever,” she said, “there wasn’t a hint of anything like love in the room.”

PAGE EIGHTEEN

Having stepped pic 1, partially visible in the clip, down to monochrome, I wanted to try this:

I want you to try something here. Do it in chiaroscuro. No outlines. Hard lighting, everything told in the blacks. The easiest touchstone I can think of is David Lloyd's V FOR VENDETTA, though I think Steranko's RED TIDE gave him the idea. And there's NO COLOUR and NO GREYS. Pure black and white.

Although I mention V and RED TIDE, I got the idea from John Bolton; who, in illustrating an old Hammer DRACULA film adaptation, went from monochrome wash to pure black-and-white in moments of violence. Suddenly, the world goes very stark, and harsh.

Oh, and the caption on Pic 3 should read:

YOU DON'T WIN FIGHTS BY BEING A STRONG MAN OR A CLEVER BOXER. YOU WIN FIGHTS BY BEING MORE PREPARED TO PERMANENTLY FUCK UP THE OTHER GUY.

We’ll fix that in the collection, I guess…

DESOLATION JONES #1 was written by me, illustrated by JH Williams, with colour art by Jose Villarubia and calligraphy by Todd Klein, as published by Wildstorm Signature, and remains (c) and TM Warren Ellis and JH Williams 2005 all rights reserved.

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